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This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the effect of music programs on reading ability; a coordinated laboratory-classroom approach to the teaching of reading; teachers' attitudes toward the language experience approach as a supplement to the basal reader; the effects of auditory discrimination training on reading readiness; reading questions in basal reading series; a comparison of a psycholinguistic and a conventional reading approach; practices of successful primary teachers of reading; relationships between teacher attitudes and verbal interaction during reading instruction; an individualized reading approach using peer teachers; possible sex differences in reading achievement of pupils from open and traditional classroom settings; students' reading and mathematics achievement before and after decentralization in selected Detroit schools; the effect of selected prereading skills on subsequent reading achievement; an approach to teaching three-year-old children to read; and children's vocabulary achievement change over summer vacation. (GW)

This annotated bibliography lists more than 170 items and is part of a continuing attempt to inform English teachers about recent developments in education. Entries are listed in six categories: bilingual and bidialectical studies; language and verbal learning; literature, humanities, and media; teacher education; testing and evaluation; and written and oral communication. Within each of these categories, items are listed according to subcategories: preschool and elementary, secondary, college and adult, status surveys, and reviews of literature. (KS)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with the following topics: case studies of college student and adult composing processes; developing patterns and individual differences in children's writing; writing apprehension's relation to writing quality; egocentrism in the written work of college freshman composition students; synchronic/diachronic linguistic analysis of high school student compositions; syntactic development in college freshman composition students; cross-cultural comparison of three writing systems as they relate to dyslexia; a framework for discourse analysis; audience adaptation skill development for writing persuasively; and the relationship between the written communication of community college deans and their effectiveness ratings. (RL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: various factors in terms of attitudes toward reading; the effect of group counseling on self-concept and reading achievement; the effect of three modes of instruction on comprehension and attitude scores of secondary language arts students; the influence of learning laboratory techniques on reading achievement; the effect of advanced organizers and text organization on reading comprehension; the effects of mastery testing on reading comprehension; sex role expectancy as a determinant of reading behavior; an investigation of the relative effect between questions and declarative statements as guides to reading comprehension; syntactic complexity and its effects on mathematical problems; readability of several versions of the Bible; the effects of readability levels on subject content in American history textbooks; the effects of noise on reading comprehension and task completion time; the effects of intergrade tutoring on reading achievement; and compressed speech as an aid in improving the reading skills of junior high students. (MKM)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the effect of instruction in critical listening on the reading progress of remedial readers; the effects of four tutoring procedures on the oral reading responses of learning disability children; the cost effectiveness of four programs for low income students; the effects of verb inflectional ending acquisition on academically failing children's literal reading comprehension; children's verbal comprehension as measured in psychometric and ecometric coordinate systems; attitudes of remedial reading, learning disabilities, and classroom teachers toward job roles; the effects of transcendental meditation on the reading achievement of learning disabled children; New York State implementation of Title I pupil selection criteria for reading programs; television script intervention as a prescriptive program for adolescent subliteracy; the relationship between teacher and principal attitude and student achievement in Title I reading programs; approaches to teaching reading to adolescent delinquents; long term effects of remedial reading programs; and the use of elementary education majors as reading tutors to disadvantaged children. (GT)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles deal with the following topics: the development of strategies and materials for teaching speech communication to students in a remedial pilot program; the treatment of ethics in selected speech communication textbooks; methods of instruction in the college communication classroom; the development of the system for integrated language communications observation; the effects of three methods of instruction on student comprehension and application of the communication process; 25 communication modules for middle school students; sex and sex role differences in the classroom verbal behavior of college students; orientations among speech faculty and chairpersons toward faculty performance assessments; the effect of a communication training model on ninth grade students; the organization of verbal interaction in classroom lessons and its effect on successful classroom participation; verbal interaction of student teachers and their pupils during language arts and social science lessons; verbal communications of teachers and students in small groups for personal and interpersonal growth in the classroom; and the effect of assertive communication and presence of audience on students' and teachers' perceptions of the rules that guide a student in a disagreement with a teacher. (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 11 titles deal with the following topics: the role and function of the California Journalism Articulation Committee; international communication as an academic career for journalism professors; network television news discourse; the content of news messages read and viewed in Ohio during the 1972 Presidential campaign; attitudes revealed by student newspaper editorials at five liberal arts colleges between 1963 and 1973; nonverbal determinants of a television newscaster's credibility; differences in cognitive styles and personality variables among graduate students in journalism, law, and business; influences on the news decision-making of foreign correspondents in Asia; personality factors and readership behavior of the audience of an Air Force internal publication; the personal versus the traditional approach to teaching reporting in college; and the way independent student newspapers and those maintained as a laboratory for journalism instruction fulfill the functions of the university campus press. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with the following topics: the composing processes of four twelfth-grade students; the relationship of writing quality to syntax; the development of language variables in two modes of writing and their relationship to reading comprehension in the primary grades; factors of style in prose for children; the interests and concerns of adolescents as expressed in their written composition; the relationship between personality type and writing achievement; cognitive egocentrism and written discourse; stylistic discriminants of good and poor writing at the tenth-grade level; the use of syntactic punctuation in student writing in grades eight, ten, and twelve; causes of failure to learn to write; psychological and stylistic correlates of writing behavior; the needs and concepts of individual students in a post-secondary remedial writing program; a case study of remedial writers in selected two-year colleges; and the relationship between reading achievement and writing achievement among college freshmen. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: the effects of preinstructional activities on the learning and retention of prose; the interaction of picture and print in reading instruction; the perception of structure in scrambled texts; models for the encoding of meaning in memory; the cue systems involved in prose processing; the effect of linguistic connectives on reading comprehension; a comparison of the effects of word frequency and graphic feature characteristics upon the word recognition performance of first grade children; the predictability of four types of sentences as measured by the eye-voice span of graduate student readers; an investigation of cloze procedure as a memory-search process; a study of the organization of concepts in semantic memory and semantic processing; the effects of maturation and achievement upon passage independent test performance; a psycholinguistic description of comprehension as demonstrated by gifted readers in grades four and five; covert speech in the beginning reading process; reorganization and the recall of prose; and the relationship of imagery and propositions to the understanding of sentences. (MAI)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles deal with the following topics: a teacher training project offering a structured reading program as a model for the teaching of reading; relationships between students in traditional and competency-based reading methods courses; the effectiveness of a graduate course in reading and linguistics structured as traditional and as competency-based; variables that predict clinician success for students in a master's degree in reading program; the communication skills of undergraduate education majors; a competency-based program model for secondary English teacher education; the ability of elementary education majors to diagnose children's communication disorders; a teacher inservice program in verbal and nonverbal interaction skills; teacher preparation programs in Texas for secondary English teachers; two self-instructional learning components to prepare undergraduates to teach reading in an open classroom; factors underlying competence of reading interns; competencies needed by teachers of developmental English in two-year colleges; and the effect of training teachers to formulate literal, inferential, and critical questions to guide students' reading. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: personal expressiveness in creative writing programs; generative rhetoric and writing performance; the effects of sentence combining exercises on syntactic maturity, writing quality, reading ability, and student attitudes; lyric poetry writing; transformational grammar; peer evaluation of student writing; the effects of instruction in five components of the writing process on writing quality and syntactic complexity; remedial writing instruction; a language study approach to college freshman composition; teaching editing; the Iowa Writers' Workshop; a structured program for teaching composition in the secondary school; changing patterns in the teaching of composition from 1930 to 1976; and student awareness of teacher criteria for evaluating writing as an element in the composing process. (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the relationships among psychological differentiation, situational context, and linguistics; the effect of cognitive complexity and audience attitude on persuasive strategies; ideological uses of myth; a rhetorical approach to teacher-student communication; rhetorical fantasy in the Webster-Calhoun Debate of 1833; the persuasive and informative aspects of trans-scientific literature; innovation in communication networks; school integration for improved minority achievement; the communication behavior of a federal agency; identifying patterns of communication between health professionals and their clients; the strategies of self-defense in a government security hearing; the relationship between marital adjustment and communication; an analysis of rhetorical communication; patterns of arrangements in President Kennedy's addresses; trait and state communication apprehension; kinesic cues in speech comprehension; female leadership in small groups; a case study of interpersonal communication; the rhetoric of one American scientist; interaction analysis in collective bargaining; and evocative language in selected senatorial speeches. (MAI)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: reading achievement as it relates to child dependency, the development of phonological coding, short-term memory and associative learning, variables available in school records, haptic and related perceptual functioning, auditory memory, home environment among black pupils of low socioeconomic status, and cognitive development and language development; interaction of a visual form integration task on word recognition; the relationship between reading gain and school behavior among fourth, fifth, and sixth grade disabled readers; performance of high, moderate, and low reading subjects on a read and record task; predictors of reading achievement; comparison of first grade readers and nonreaders on use of linguistic cues for identifying words; self-perceptions of reading abilities related to achievement, attitudes toward reading, and cognitive styles; finger agnosia in disabled children; characteristics of productive control of English language structures in comprehension; communication processes in families with disabled readers; testing linguistic competence with cloze procedure; spelling skills; play behaviors; characteristics of successful and unsuccessful learning disabled students; and comprehension of syntactic structures. (TJ)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: advance organizers; a comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of behavioral objectives and sample tests; anaphoric nominal substitution and its relationship to reading comprehension among college students; the effects of inferential processing induced by inserted questions on prose recall; the effect of method of presentation and degree of imagery on learning responses to printed words; direction and organization and adolescent learning disabled students' reading comprehension; the effects of reading ability and material difficulty on students' abilities to recognize words in isolation and in context; a comparison of memory for verbatim and inferential information in prose at two grade levels; the role of cultural schemata in narrative comprehension; the effect of oral versus written presentation of an advance organizer on retention; a comparison of the effects of questions and of advance organizers on comprehension and retention of prose materials; integrating information from text; and memory for prose: a processing activities approach. (FL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: the acquisition of bilingualism by infants and young children; psycholinguistic abilities of American Indian children; effects of creative dramatics on oral language abilities and self esteem of blacks, Chicanos, and Anglos; factors that affect Chicano and Anglo children's acquisition of knowledge from connected discourse; the relation between reading achievement and bidialectal oral language performance of black children; use of the language experience approach in summer schools for bilingual migrant children; reading problems of black children as assessed through the concept of syntactic distractibility; the relationship between teachers' attitudes toward black vernacular English and self concept formation in black children; the effect of folk legends told in the Chicano Spanish dialect on Chicano children's attitudes and comprehension; language patterns and socioeconomic status as criteria for academic success of black students; the effects of selected variables on school achievement of Mexican American children; and code switching among Spanish-English bilingual children. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics related to the teaching of English, including the following: film study, the use of media, and the teaching of listening skills in the English classroom; students' academic success attitudes, and interests as related to selected aspects of the English curriculum; English teachers' attitudes toward English usage; the use of student-centered English curricula; teacher expectancies for students; the preparation of secondary level English teachers; the role of secondary school English department heads; employment prospects for persons with doctorates in English; and courses involving the study of folklore, the study of the history of American English, and the teaching of communication skills through use of the typewriter. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with the following topics related to teacher education in reading and communication skills: inservice education in secondary reading for English teachers; prospective English teachers' attitudes toward composition; the relationship of teacher licensing procedures to pupil reading achievement; the development of preservice teachers' verbal communication competencies; the assessment of student progress in preservice reading methods modules; an inservice program for secondary content-area teachers in teaching content reading; a stage centered method of teaching dramatic literature to prospective English teachers; inservice approaches for teaching elementary teachers about spelling research and practice; attitude change in college students while learning methods of teaching English; prospective teachers' knowledge of dictionary facts and skills; evaluation of a preservice English education program; variables that predict success for reading specialists; a course to aid teachers in listening effectively to students; and the preparation of preservice early childhood teachers for the teaching of reading. (GW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) conditional constructions in modern English; (2) phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height; (3) neural coding of pitch; (4) the semantics of definite and indefinite descriptions; (7) restrictive modification; (8) children's narrative styles and differential access to literacy; (9) language variation in graduate students; (10) semiotics, speech acts, and phenomenology; (11) textbuilding conventions and personal style in oral courtship narrative; (12) talk in classrooms; (13) perceptual effects of phonetic mismatches; and (14) discourse markers. (FL)